An Overview of the Andrew File System

John H. Howard

Abstract

Andrew is a distributed computing environment being developed in a joint project by Carnegie Mellon University and IBM. One of the major components of Andrew is a distributed file system. The goal of the Andrew File System is to support growth up to at least 7000 workstations (one for each student, faculty member, and staff at Carnegie Mellon) while providing users, application programs, and system administrators with amenities of the shared file system. This overview describes the environment, design, and features of the file system, and ends with a summary of it "feels" to end users and to system administrators.